Heineken Shakes Up Bond

As for A, my apologies. I had a beerathon last weekend and it was canceled and it left me distraught. FYI: If you’re ever signed up to take part in a seemingly unorthodox beer tasting event (26 different beers at 26 different bars), shoot the event organizer an e-mail to make sure they’ve squared away the proper permits. In this case, they hadn’t. They pulled the event the day before. It was devastating (and also totallyÂ the thing I was planning to blog about last weekend).

As for B, I know, right?! For those of you who aren’t beer geeks or Bond nerds- shame on you- there has been quite the internet ruckus over a recent article in AdAge, where Eric Schultz reports:

In the movie, Bond will swap his trademark martini for a sip of the brew — at least in one scene.

The movie he’s talking about is Skyfall, the newest of the Bond franchise out this fall. The brew is Heineken, who has struck a product placement deal to have Bond drink a Heineken at least once during the film. People are pissed! They’re up in arms! And they have no idea what they’re talking about… yet.

The “shaken, not stirred” martini is, of course, a necessary staple to any Bond film and to omit it from the new film would leave most Bond fans a sour taste of the Daniel Craig bond taking himself too seriously. Can he drink one beer, though? I’m okay with that. As Robert Fure of Film School RejectsÂ points out in a recent “Boiling Point”, Bond never survived on a strict diet of martinis.

You see, in the books James Bond isnâ€™t much of a martini drinker. Various people have counted up the incidents, and he drinks 19 vodka martinis and 16 gin martinis throughout the books …Â Bond drank champagne more than sixty times in the books, and also guzzled Scotch (with soda) and Bourbon (neat). Combined, his whiskey drinks amount to 99 beverages.

The bottom-line is this: we don’t know enough to be up in arms yet. If Bond has in fact given up martinis entirely, that’s a bit of a problem. But the man is allowed to drink other stuff. I mean, imagine if he didn’t.

“This is the best spy we have: 007!”
“Is he good?”“The best!”
“Let’s get the man a beer, then!”“Eh, well- eherm. Actually, he only drinks martinis.”
“…”

It would be pansy-ish. So relax. I will keep my Ear to the Beer (BoozinBlog’s unofficial local news-esque motto) and update whenever possible.

~Don Julian

P.S. For those of you wondering if there’ve been any updates on Ludacris’ ATL airport restaurant, I’m still waiting and even following him on Twitter in hopes of announcements.)